What is Marriage

Getting rid of old programming isn't easy

The smashing of the illusions of my past has shaped my present; adversity first knocked me flat and then forced me to rebuild new visions of hope and experience. But back when I was a child I accepted Mother’s mantra …” It’s always a woman’s responsibility to make a marriage happy. If the marriage goes wrong, or if a husband strays, it is the woman’s fault.”
The first time I married, I was 20 years old. I put aside my brushes, renounced my artistic passion, along with my name and became Mrs. H. Robert Uschan. It was the beginning of losing my dreams as well as my name. My second daughter, recently asked me if I had had any doubts before I got married to her father. I can’t say that I did, but I was terribly young, even at 20. Now girls at 13 have more worldly experience than I had.
My parents’ marriage was my model of a balanced partnership that I assumed would me mine once I got married. My mother and father were married three months after they met in 1915. My mother, Hermina, was 17 when she met Joe Krausz. She was a voluptuous, dark-eyed beauty and he a redheaded freckled faced man of 23. They were introduced at a picnic, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Magic was in the air and an instant connection was formed. When Hermina was asked by her girl friends what she saw in the “red-faced Kraus,” she was not daunted by the disparagement of Joe’s appearance. She saw a young and handsome man well on his way to opening his own sheet metal business.
Hermina and Joe had three chaperoned dates. It would have been considered most inappropriate for a single girl to be seen alone with a man. Her brother Henry accompanied the young couple on these dates. I am sure that Joe had enough of Henry and wanted to get Hermina alone. That meant marriage. When he proposed, Hermina said, “You must ask my father’s permission, but if he says no, I will marry you anyway.”
My grandfather took an immediate liking to Joe, this ambitious, soft-spoken man, and the answer to the nuptials was yes.
Hermina had been working full time as a seamstress, turning her earnings over to her father. He gave her five cents a week as her allowance. As a child I was amazed when she told me that she had to decide each week between buying an ice cream or going to a silent movie.
She had two blouses appropriate for work. Every night she would wash out the one she had been wearing all day and iron the other blouse for the next day.
She explained her early life to me. “I wanted to get out of my father’s house. He had remarried and I couldn’t stand his new wife. Marriage to Daddy was escape.”
Joe and Hermina started their forty-two year marriage in 1915. It proved to be the beginning of a close partnership in life and business.
The wedding was a simple home ceremony, a gift of pots and pans, and no honeymoon, Working together started immediately.
Father was easygoing, patient, and loving, but he didn’t have the natural business savvy and money management sense of Mother. Over the years as their profits grew Hermina did all the investing including buying of real estate. Together, they worked to build a successful company, and they were inseparable until mother’s death. Unfortunately when Mother died, Dad had never even written a check. He was a sheet metal artisan. He would boast, “I only know one thing. The sheet metal business, but I know it better than anyone else.”
I felt I was just an observer in this close relationship , but I didn’t mind because I believed and expected that I‘d have the same kind of intimacy and partnership when I got married. There was never any doubt in my mind that I would marry. I was looking forward to my own family. I had been groomed to be a wife.

As a small child when I fell down or hurt myself is some way my mother would say,”Never mind, you will forget all about it when you are married.” Marriage was my goal in life.
Bob and I met in college. I was happy and excited to be majoring in art after an emotional struggle with mom who did not want me to be an artist. My father said, “What good is art, you can’t eat it or wear it.”

But being able to spent many hours a day drawing, painting and sculpting between my other academic subjects was my dream come true.Bob was a journalist major. I thought that was romantic – an artist and a writer. He was cute, very witty and wooed me with clever notes hidden around campus. Finding them was a treasure hunt.
Though my parents provided me with a college education, there was an unspoken understanding that I would find an educated man and go on to a comfortable life being the perfect wife of a successful professional. It was implicit that I was to remain a virgin until I was married.
One romantic summer night, Bob and I were lying on a blanket on the Lake Forest beach. What was I thinking? I actually fell for the old line; “Just lie down next to me. I’m not going to do anything.”
It sure didn’t seem like anything, but when I got home and saw the telltale blood, I realized that I was no longer a virgin. I sobbed for days. “I am ruined. All is lost. No decent man would want me now. I have to marry Bob”
Our backgrounds and religions were contrary. Even though both set of parents came from the “old country” There were vast differences in the families’ life style and ethics.
My parents had built my father’s one– man tin shop into a very successful sheet metal factory with many employees and a fleet of trucks. Mother invested money well. There were stocks, bonds and rental properties. Our home in Lake Bluff, Illinois was comfortable and furnished with select pieces from the Beacon Hill Collection. The surrounding two acres of woods included a trickling stream in a ravine, where mother planted her rock gardens. She worked side by side with the gardener to create all the flowering spots of color.
My father wanted to buy a Cadillac, but Mother said, “Now Joe, that’s a car for show offs. A Cadillac is much too pretentious.”
They bought a new Chrysler Imperial every few years – for the same price as the Cadillac.
I had told my parents that the young man I was seeing was also German. (I had been told that we were German decent, but really my ancestors had lived 300 years in Hungary.)

When my folks were introduced to Bob’s family, my father said, ”They’re not German. Germans would have made something of themselves. They are Serbian.”
Bob’s family lived in Chicago close to Wrigley Field. His father worked as a janitor and his mother was a factory worker. They were Catholic. My father was an ex-Catholic who carried deep bitterness about the church, and said if I married a Catholic, he would disown me.
The shouting and fighting in Bob’s house shocked me. My parents never fought, or if they did, I never heard it. The most irritation that I heard my father express was when Mom nagged a bit too much and he would say, “Now Mudder….”
The Bob’s parents said, “Those uppity Krausz’ are not German. They are Hungarian.”
After two years of dating, one evening Bob gave me a small engagement ring. We drove to my house and I woke my mother. “Look Mom. I am engaged.”
Dad did not get out of bed. Mother tied her robe closer around her. “Hmm,” she murmured. “Good luck.”
It was no secret that my engagement to Bob disappointed Mother. She undoubtedly sensed the problems that I was inviting into my life. Bob was not her idea of a proper match for me. I felt I had no choice. I had to marry Bob. I was not a virgin. I was confident that I would make the perfect wife and life would be like a Leave it to Beaver episode.
Bob’s parents were thrilled and started planning the polka music for the wedding reception. They insisted that there had to be a meat and potato sit-down dinner and an open bar or they would not attend the reception.
My mother thought all evil came from alcohol.
In a home ceremony, June of 1955, Bob and I exchanged our vows under a white flower covered trellis facing the wooded ravine.
I had designed my simple white silk dress with tiny seed pearls enhancing the V neckline. My mother created the dress following my drawing. During the weeks preceding the wedding I was so nervous I couldn’t eat much. At each fitting she scolded me about losing weight that was forcing her to make alterations on the charmeuse silk Those alterations left tiny needle marks on her perfect work. Finally she refused to take in the dress one more time and said, “ That’s it! You’ll have to wear it with the shoulders hanging.” She stuck to her word and at that point I was happy I didn’t have to go through any more fittings.
The next argument was about the Belgium lace veil that I found in the previous summer’s trip to Europe. I wanted to simply drape the lace on my head like a mantilla, but Mother insisted that I must attach the veil to the little lace Juliet cap that I also bought. She won the argument since I was sick of fighting.
I choice to carry a bouquet of daisies; my favorite flowers. I liked them because they weren’t fragile or pretentious..
Mother made sure that the head judge of the county circuit court performed the ceremony.
. We had two separate receptions that balmy June day in 1955 because Mother wouldn’t dream of inviting her friends to the later one. She thought that kind of celebration was déclassé.
The sophisticated first reception followed the garden wedding. The refreshments served after we had greeted the guests in the receiving line were elegant. Strawberries floated in the champagne punch. Silver trays were loaded with dainty finger foods and live music from Cavalleria Rusticana played as the guest mingled.
I was practicing saying,” I would like you to meet my husband” when Aunt Mary approached us and touched my arm to get my attention. She whispered, “Your mother just collapsed. A doctor is with her.”
I raced to Mom’s bedroom and saw her lying spread–eagle on the bed. The doctor turned and said, “She’ll be fine. It was just too much excitement. I have given her a tranquilizer.”
When the guests for the first reception left, we drove to the Elk’s Club in Waukegan. There was the open bar, the roast beef dinner and the accordionist playing the polka music.
When the dinner and dancing was finished, I sat outside on the wooden porch swing with one of my bride’s maids, waiting for my new husband to leave his buddies in the bar. I got my first picture of what my marriage would become. Bob appeared at last, drunk and reluctant to leave the party.

to be continued